MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. It's Tech Tuesday. When it comes to tech startup companies, most of us think Silicon Valley. But now that so much happens via technology, online, virtually, smaller cities far from the epicenter of tech innovation are quietly beginning to make their mark. Baltimore may be among those cities. And those who have launched tech businesses in Baltimore say it's got some advantages.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIThere are impressive numbers of university campuses and medical centers to fuel research and collaboration. It's close to the federal hub and many government and defense contractors. And compared to Washington, D.C., it's cheap, making it attractive to entrepreneurs, artists and other creative types, all of which, say Baltimore's champions, point to a great atmosphere for tech startups.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIJoining us to discuss this topic on Tech Tuesday is Ann Lansinger, president of the Emerging Technology Centers, a tech incubator initiative of the Baltimore Development Corporation. Ann Lansinger, thank you for joining us.

MS. ANN LANSINGERThank you very much for inviting us.

NNAMDIAlso with us is Mike Brenner. He is the founder of Startup Baltimore. Mike Brenner, thank you for joining us.

MR. MIKE BRENNERThank you for having me.

NNAMDIEllen Hemmerly is the executive director of the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus Research Park Corporation. Ellen Hemmerly, good to have you aboard.

MS. ELLEN HEMMERLYThank you.

NNAMDIAnd Dave Troy is the CEO of 410 Labs. That's a Baltimore-based company that develops communication tools, including Shortmail, simplified email limited to 500 characters or less. Dave Troy, good to have you aboard.

MR. DAVE TROYThank you, Kojo. Glad to be here.

NNAMDIYou, too, can join this conversation. Call us at 800-433-8850. You can send email to kojo@wamu.org, send us a tweet, @kojoshow, or simply go to our website, kojoshow.org, and join the conversation there. Have you launched, or have you considered launching, a tech business in Baltimore? 800-433-8850 is the number to call. Dave Troy, you considered moving to the West Coast. Why did you decide to launch your tech company in Charm City?

TROYWell, I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur, and I started my first company in Severna Park, outside of Baltimore, when I was in high school, back in the '80s, and continued to kind of build up business in the Baltimore area. And at various times, I considered, you know, moving to San Francisco. But, you know, for me, there's a kind of specialness of being connected to a place and having a long-term relationship with a place, plus all the, you know, familial kind of connections that we have.

TROYAnd I guess I got to a point where I started to ask myself, why do I need to go to, you know, Silicon Valley to start something like this? Can I do it here? And so it led me to start to search for ways to do what I wanted to do in Baltimore.

NNAMDIAnd it turned out, in your view, well so far?

TROYSo far, I'm on probably my fifth or sixth company. I don't really keep count. And, you know, I'm finding the resources and the peers that I think, you know, you need to succeed. And then we're also getting some investment from Silicon Valley investors, which is really kind of the best of both worlds.

NNAMDIWell, Ellen Hemmerly, Martin O'Malley probably won't like hearing me say this, but Maryland isn't known for being particularly business friendly, at least not compared to, say, oh, Delaware. What would you say makes Baltimore appealing for tech companies and, in particular, for startups?

HEMMERLYI think one of the real advantages we have is the talent that we are producing out of our universities. And because of having so many students who are graduating in the STEM fields, it makes it attractive for startup companies, like Dave's. We also have a history of innovation. We have a very extensive incubation system in the state of Maryland and several very good research parks, like the one that I'm involved with.

NNAMDIAnn, how have you seen the tech startup community in Baltimore develop, evolve, if you will, over the past decade?

LANSINGERWell, I think it's -- excuse me. I think it's been very interesting to watch this. When I first came to the ETC in 1999, the tech community was actually quite small. And you really had to peek under the baskets to find out where they were. They weren't obvious. But over the years, I think, Baltimore has developed more and more into a tech hub with lots of companies, like Mike's and Dave, being interested in being in the city. They see it as vibrant. They see it as collegial. They see an opportunity to work together that they may not find easily in a larger city.

LANSINGERAnd I think there's a lot of resources there for them as well. So what I have seen is a development from a very small tech community to what now appears to be quite a vibrant one. And I will add that we're getting more and more calls from prospects all the time, so the number of calls that we used to get in years gone by have multiplied quite a bit. So we're seeing a lot of interest and new people coming into this technology hub as well.

NNAMDIYou may have heard the acronym ETC used from time to time on this broadcast. That, of course, is Emerging Technology Centers, of which Ann Lansinger is the president. Mike, you see some advantages in being far from the tech Mecca of Silicon Valley. Why? What are they?

BRENNERSo I considered moving to Silicon Valley right out of college. And I ended up in Baltimore kind of on a whim and just found such a great landscape to kind of make a name for yourself. You're kind of a big fish in a smaller pond, if you will. So me wanting to get into the business of Web design and development and building software products, I didn't want to compete with anybody out in the West Coast. I kind of wanted to make a name for myself on the East Coast. And I saw a lot of great of opportunities.

BRENNERIt's a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, and so some of us are involved in putting some of those pieces together to make a nice nest in Baltimore for other people to prosper. But there's a lot of great opportunity in Baltimore.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call. Here's Kate in Washington, D.C. Kate, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

KATEHi, Kojo. How are you?

NNAMDII am well.

KATEGood, good. Let me just simply say that I spent 25 years in Silicon Valley, living in Menlo Park area, so I know the valley very, very well. And I think that it is -- I will say this to Ann. It is remarkable that you guys are thinking about really moving real forward with Baltimore. It has everything that you would need, but I would add this proviso. One of the things about the West Coast and the Bay Area and Silicon Valley is that the opportunity for minorities either in tech or in the creative and social media arts, et cetera, has been limited.

KATEIt may be changing somewhat, but just given the demographics out there, it's not prevalent in terms of the number of people of color that can be brought in. Baltimore has a unique opportunity to do the outreach and to have a complete, new, unique perspective from people of color to join the tech community and to come into it and bring new ideas and new perspectives, as well as people that are older, and I would ask that when you do your outreach and your startups that you look at people that are older and that you look at people of color.

NNAMDIHey, Kate, thank you very much for your call. Here is Ann Lansinger.

LANSINGERKate, I'm so happy that you called and had those comments because they're so completely in line with what we are doing at the Emerging Technology Centers. Approximately 40 percent of our companies happen to be minority or women who own firms. We haven't necessarily been looking for people of a certain age, but we have been directly and working hard to find minority companies. We've been working with some of our partners in the city, at Morgan State University and in other places as well, to try to identify those new startup companies that are women- and minority-owned.

NNAMDIAnd, Dave, you see a different perspective in a place like Baltimore, and you say that's not a bad thing.

TROYYeah. I mean, I think one of the great things -- and this is, you know, similar to Kate's point -- is that we have natural assets that exist in Baltimore that really don't exist anywhere else. You know, we have things like Johns Hopkins, and we have UMBC and, you know, other really great universities that are driving kind of our character. Plus we do have, you know, a very diverse population that can be brought in and can be, you know, amplified and, you know, allow everyone to participate in creating companies and creating wealth.

TROYSo I think, you know, it's a little bit -- I don't know. You know, sometimes, when you're in Silicon Valley, there's sort of a sense that you're in an echo chamber. A friend of mine said once that they're all smoking the same air, you know.

TROYAnd you do get a sense in some place like Baltimore that you're in a place that values independent thinking and is a little bit out of the box and away from the fray and allows for, you know, some different kinds of innovation to emerge.

NNAMDIEllen Hemmerly, are all companies global now, no matter where they might be located?

HEMMERLYPretty much, and we're finding that -- certainly, that's one of the advantages of the Internet age. But it's also requiring incubators and research parks to connect globally as well, so we can provide access and more services to companies.

NNAMDIAnd, Dave, even though you make the point that Silicon Valley is like an echo chamber, it's my understanding that you've gone to conferences where you meet with people from Silicon Valley, and they don't realize that you are from Baltimore.

TROYWell, one of the things that I've had the opportunity to do the last three or four years is to participate in some trips called Geeks on a Plane, which have basically been sort of trade trips that have been put together by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Dave McClure. And his thought was he wanted to go meet the startup communities in different parts of the world. And he thought, as long as he was going anyway, he might as well bring some people with him. So I've been to, now, Asia twice.

TROYWe went to Beijing and Tokyo and Shanghai and Singapore and Seoul and then also to South America, to Santiago and to Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. And, you know, the thing that I've come away with really traveling the world a lot over the last three or four years and visiting with startups everywhere is that the kind of trend that we're seeing taking place in Baltimore, where the startup community is becoming more vibrant and better interconnected, isn't actually unique to Baltimore. I mean, there's -- these things are happening all around the world.

TROYBut what I keep coming back to after visiting with these folks in other countries and seeing sort of what they're up against, you know, we have a much more entrepreneurial climate in Baltimore than you do, say, in Berlin or in, you know, Buenos Aires. And, you know, part of it is because we're America. You know, we have, you know, really great support for small businesses. And it's culturally seen as, you know, pretty normal to start -- do a startup.

TROYAs where in some place like China, if you do a startup and you fail, you know, you might have lost your family's money, and that's not seen as, you know, a very attractive thing to a lot of people. So as a result of doing those trips, I've met a lot of people in Silicon Valley. And that's really helped me to kind of act as though I'm part of the Silicon Valley community, but I actually live in Baltimore.

TROYSo when you say that, you know, I visit people there that, you know, they don't realize that I'm not based there, it's because I'm plugged into them all through, you know, online networks and through travel and things like that.

NNAMDIUnderscoring the point that Ellen made earlier. You, too, can join this conversation on Tech Tuesday about startups and Baltimore, 800-433-8850. What do you think of the business climate in Baltimore for technology companies? 800-433-8850, or send us email to kojo@wamu.org. Ellen Hemmerly?

HEMMERLYYeah. I wanted to mention that Mike and I just came back from a mission of about 40 business people and university officials to visit the Silicon Valley. And, I think, what we heard is that there's some real envy of the talent that we have in the Baltimore-Washington area, but also in terms of cyber security, which is a very significant business opportunity that the perception is Maryland is the place to really locate those businesses.

NNAMDISo that, even though all companies are now global, you have flipped the coin and said that location can, however, be important.

HEMMERLYWell, I do think that, particularly if you're trying to make sales to the government -- the government is a really unique animal. And it's a great comment because, at the end of the day, those personal relationships and knowing how to work a network is essential, even for these startup companies.

NNAMDIWhen you're dealing with the government, face time is important, too, isn't it?

HEMMERLYThat's right.

NNAMDI800-433-8850. Mike, in 2006, you launched a company called Sunrise Design and found it was difficult to offer some of the amenities that bigger companies offer. What was your solution?

BRENNERSo myself and Dave, and a few other guys, kind of all went in on a common shared space for independents and for freelancers and for small teams. It's called a co-working space. And they have these all around the world, where you get all these shared amenities of a big corporate environment, a conference room and coffee machines and Wi-Fi and all that kind of stuff, a mailbox, but each person is working on their own projects in their own kind of company's missions.

BRENNERSo it's actually a very, very studied model right now. A lot of companies are trying build these little things within their own companies because they see a lot of innovation coming out of this space. By putting a bunch of worker bees in the same room, a lot of serendipitous things are coming out of it. It's what you see coming out of Google and some other very innovative companies out there. So we've got a couple in Baltimore right now, and I think they're a very important part of the entrepreneurial life cycle.

NNAMDIYeah, you became one of the founding members of Baltimore's first co-working space, Beehive Baltimore, which is something we are going to be talking about after a short break. If you'd like the join the conversation, call us at 800-433-8850. It's Tech Tuesday. You can also send email to kojo@wamu.org, or send us a tweet at #TechTuesday, or you can simply go to our website, kojoshow.org. Join the conversation there. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back. It's Tech Tuesday. We're discussing Baltimore tech startups with Dave Troy. He is CEO of 410 Labs, which is a company that develops communication tools, including Shortmail, simplified email limited to 500 characters or less. Mike Brenner is the founder of Startup Baltimore. Ellen Hemmerly is the executive director of the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus Research Park Corporation. And Ann Lansinger is the president of the Emerging Technology Centers. That's a tech incubator initiative of the Baltimore Development Corporation.

NNAMDIWhen we took that break, Ann Lansinger, we were talking about Beehive Baltimore, which your organization hosts. That's the group Mike was talking about. It also offers both an incubator and accelerator program. Could you tell us about all of this?

LANSINGERSure, I'll be glad to. The Beehive is actually a co-working location. People who come in to there are sole proprietors. They can rent a seat from anywhere, from half a day to several days a week or a month. They come for the opportunity to work in a community of other like-minded entrepreneurs. The incubator is our traditional opportunity to assist the companies to grow. People come there for two or three years. While they're with us, they receive extensive business coaching and mentoring.

LANSINGERThey receive a lot of help in terms of connections, contacts, access to funding, access to university resources as needed. And with that situation, we're looking for people who are with us during a growth phase. They leave that facility after a couple of years and, hopefully, go out, rent space, hire people, pay taxes, make the mayor very happy. The accelerator is something that we're just getting ready to launch.

LANSINGERThis is modeled on accelerators that we have seen around the country, like Y Combinator, Betaworks, tech stores, a number of others, that have flourished in New York, San Francisco, Boston and, I think, Boulder, Colo. So with this program, this is going to be something that we're going to advertise for participants nationwide. Our website is being developed now. We're going to have a select committee who will vet all of the applications and help us make the selections.

LANSINGERPeople coming in will be given a $20,000 seed funding round, plus they will be with us for three months of very, very intensive coaching and mentoring, speaker series, dinners, everything that we can possibly put together to help them get to a point where they'll be ready for a product launch after three months. And that'll culminate with the demo day. So what we see in this is a very nice ecosystem of entrepreneurship that's growing in Baltimore.

NNAMDI800-433-8850, what advantages or disadvantages do you see for tech companies in Baltimore? Here is Joe in Gaithersburg, Md. Joe, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JOEYeah. I've done a few startups myself and raised money in Menlo Park and Silicon Valley as well. What venture capital funds are located in Baltimore? Because, for me, for what we did, it was where the money was at that became most important. We did our startups in the Washington, D.C. area. Even then we still had to go to the West Coast to raise money, or to Boston. So I would say making the venture capitalist happy is probably the number one situation.

NNAMDIEllen Hemmerly, when it come to startups, as our caller, Joe, points out, funding and capital are often major issues. How does Baltimore rate in terms of attracting capital?

HEMMERLYHistorically, we have not had the capital that we really need to grow the startup businesses. We're still, I think, needing to have more seed capital. I saw a statistic recently that Maryland seed funding, or venture funding, about 43 percent of it is coming from California. That being said, the more we have -- as we have more opportunities for investors, the money will be here. Venture capital firms, seed funds, they locate where the deals are. And so I really don't see that as a limiting factor.

HEMMERLYI think the more we have serial entrepreneurs, like Dave Troy, the more we have programs where we're generating interesting startups, the capital will certainly be here.

TROYYeah, if I could add to that just briefly.

NNAMDIPlease do, Dave.

TROYI, you know, just completed raising a funding round, from both people here locally and also in Silicon Valley. And what I kind of found is that, you know, there are definitely some local sources of capital. You know, firms like Growtech, which really kind of had been more Baltimore-centered, now is more D.C.-centered. But, you know, they're doing very, very well. You know, there's decent access to other firms. There's a firm that invested in our company called True Ventures, which has an office here in Northern Virginia, as well as in the Valley.

TROYAnd then, also, you know, the ability to raise money in the Valley is really just a question of being willing to go and spend a little bit of time there. So I agree with Ellen in that I don't think that we're really so much constrained on capital at the moment. But I think that there's still kind of a skill set that has to be acquired by entrepreneurs in terms of figuring out how to build a network that can help raise what they need.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Joe. Jay in North Potomac, Md. has a similar issue. Jay, you're -- go right ahead, Jay.

JAYYeah. Hi, guys. Hi. Kojo, yeah, first of all, it's a very important subject. I'll just make a couple of quick comments. I've also been involved with startups, some of which have been successful, some of which have not. Number one, the venture capital is absolutely lacking. An essential part of it is that you ought to have a requirement of no more than one year to bring your product to market, to get it to a marketable form. Otherwise, you're wasting your time, and you're living in a theoretical world.

JAYOne of the things you guys are missing, or two things that are being missed explicitly, is you ought to start a startup -- you know, startups whose charter is ventured capital. I mean, why do you -- why is it only you guys doing a venture capital? Why not a bunch of, you know, young agents, people from college, et cetera, being able to put together venture capital organizations, which can do extremely well, i.e., if they go public? And, finally, the third part that you're missing is called manufacturing.

JAYEven if you have a successful venture, the manufacturing goes out to Asia or some place else, and you lose major, major business routes, supply chains and so forth. So I give you guys a lot of credit. But I think that there's an awful lot of points that need to be buttressed to really get you standing firmly and vertically.

NNAMDIJay, thank you very much for your call. You raise a number of issues. Mike, I'll start with you. How have you approached getting capital for your companies?

BRENNERSo, I think, to go back to the caller before Jay, Joe, who started his startup -- I don't know how long ago he said it was -- but access to capital, or the capital you need to start a technology company these days, is getting lower and lower. So you're seeing a lot of seed investments, and you're seeing the West Coast take advantage of this. They're making a lot of these five -- $50,000 to $100,000 investments, which could come out of the back pocket of (word?) entrepreneurs in this area and not need to be a huge multi-million dollar fundraising round.

BRENNERSo just by making that a perception change in the area, I think you can start getting a lot of activity happening. The funding I've raised for my two ventures that I've done have all been bootstrapped, so it's all the money I've made just selling products or by consulting. But I think, you know, for startups to get more active in the ecosystem in this area, to Jay and Joe's point, I think it just involves, like Dave said, being more tactical about how you're going about trying to get your money.

NNAMDIDave.

TROYYeah. Just to add on, you know, the point about raising money and, you know, sort of founding ventures that are about raising money, we -- a couple years ago, a couple of other entrepreneurs and I founded a group called Baltimore Angels, which, you know, has really been in the mode of hearing pitches from entrepreneurs, helping them to get access to capital as well as, you know, other larger investors. So there's a lot of that sort of thing in the works. And on the subject of manufacturing, that's something that I'm actually really passionate about as well.

TROYI think that if some place like Baltimore wants to kind of regain it's footing with, like, a middle class again, we simply have get a handle on manufacturing. And, yes, manufacturing at scale is really hard to compete with China and what have you, but there are things that we can do. And I think that we haven't done enough on that front. So there's a bunch of people in town that are actually looking and pushing really hard on that.

NNAMDIJim, thank you very much for your call and glad also that you brought up the issue of manufacturing because it allows me to raise the question with you, Ellen, and with you, Ann. Could you talk a little bit about what kinds of companies and what kinds of products these incubator companies are working on? Starting with you, Ellen.

HEMMERLYYeah, we have -- our project is referred to as bwtech@UMBC. We have about 80 companies right now in three primary areas. One is life sciences where the life cycle obviously is a lot longer than a year. In the technology space, we have clean energy, as well as cyber security. About a third of our companies are service-based companies. Our real sweet spot is companies that are developing innovative technologies. And so, you know, you'll see in our cyber security incubator companies that are developing anti-hacking products.

HEMMERLYIn clean energy, we've got companies that are developing processes for plants to grow more quickly and to be an alternative form of energy. Life sciences -- we have everything from therapeutics to diagnostics.

NNAMDIAnd, Ann, what kind of services does your incubator at Emerging Technology offer?

LANSINGERI think our companies resemble Ellen's quite a bit. We have a number of life sciences. We've got two or three companies who are developing new drugs. They -- we do not have lab space in our incubators. So they are doing that elsewhere, but they have their offices with us. We have a number of people developing new medical devices. We have three or four clean energy. The majority of our companies are IT, and they may be developing both hardware and software, with software being, clearly, the predominant type of company that's coming in.

LANSINGERI would like to add that we've started doing something a little more innovative with student-formed companies coming from Johns Hopkins. So, right now, we have two units at one of our incubators. One of them is occupied by three student-formed companies who are all developing medical devices, working in concert with their mentors at the university and with our business development mentors. And we've brought in another two companies from what's called the Center for Leadership Education over at Johns Hopkins.

LANSINGERSo what we're doing is trying to expand in order to try to service many populations as possible, reaching out to very, very talented students who have an interest in forming companies as well.

NNAMDIJay, thank you very much for your call. You, too, can call us at 800-433-8850. Here is Adam in Laurel, Md. Adam, your turn.

ADAMHi, Kojo. Thanks for having me on.

NNAMDIHey, Adam. You're welcome.

ADAMKojo, my family business, which is Berman Enterprises, is a three-generation business. We've been in the commercial real estate industry, but recently have started into the venture capital world. And we're based in Rockville, Md. and Laurel, Md. And we have a new venture capital fund towards a million dollars to donate -- to give or start up funding. And we're thinking about putting an incubator in our -- one of our buildings in Laurel, Md. So this is all just very exciting when it -- hearing this is about Baltimore, I'm wondering, maybe it could come down all the way to Laurel.

NNAMDIWhat do you think about that, Ellen? Things come now into Laurel?

HEMMERLYWell, I'm kind of laughing to myself, thinking, good luck. Incubators, generally, as an economic development tool, had been very successful. It's a little bit hard for private incubators to achieve the kinds of returns, I think, sometimes that folks like you are looking for, but I applaud your looking at doing this. But just so you know, the most successful incubators in the Baltimore and Maryland are projects that have some public subsidy.

NNAMDIAnd, Adam, thank you very much for your call. Ellen, could you tell us about the UMBC program that you work on right now?

HEMMERLYSure. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, we do have about 80 companies located in our research park. We...

NNAMDISeventy-one acre community.

HEMMERLYSeventy-one acre community. We operate three incubators. One of the things that we found, as incubation becomes more sophisticated, that really specializing in certain industry is as important. And so, in addition to doing many of the things that Ann was talking about, we're also creating a viable technology community in different industry sectors. We're also really fortunate UMBC is one of the largest producers, actually, in the country of IT talent.

HEMMERLYAnd so having the students, having the faculty being located five minutes from BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport and being close to D.C., as well as places like Fort Meade, we think it gives us our real advantage in terms of helping our companies grow and be successful.

NNAMDIIndeed, I was going to ask you, because Baltimore is a city with many schools and universities, how does your affiliation with UMBC help? I think you answered that by talking about the number of UMBC graduates with IT and computer science degree.

HEMMERLYYeah, and we are finding, increasingly, our companies are entering into research collaborations with faculty members who are doing research that's relevant to their businesses, so we're very fortunate to have that affiliation.

NNAMDIWe got an email from Kelly in Bethesda who writes, "Is there a place for non-tech people in this equation? For instance, all the jobs in my field, graphic design, are in Web design. I'm great at images, logos, branding, but code is definitely not my thing. How do creatives and others get on board in building these new businesses?" Any suggestions from you, Mike?

BRENNERSo to that point, I think, you know, any part of -- any technology startup these days typically has three arms. So you have a design arm, you have a developer, the code arm if you will, and then you have the hustler or the entrepreneur, the one that goes and does the biz dev for you. So I think she makes up part of that very important tripod. And if she can learn some code on her free time, I think that will even make her even better as a hybrid, to be able to understand where the design fits into the code and kind of suffice two different arms.

BRENNERAnd there's some incredible models right now that are launching online. You've got Code Academy and the Khan Academy, for example. These are two great websites where you can just spend the weekend or spend a night and learn kind of the basics of Ruby on Rails or PHP programming and really start to grasp these concepts that may seem so distant from you as a designer.

NNAMDIAnd you wanted to say?

LANSINGERWell, the other thing that I would add to what Mike had said is that a number of the companies who are the tech companies in our various incubators hire our designers. So if we're looking for job opportunities, I think it would be well worthwhile for anyone as talented as this young lady as to just simply look at the list of companies in the incubators and perhaps contact them to see if they have an interest in talking to her about a position. Several of our companies have designers.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call. What do you think of the business climate in Baltimore for technology companies? 800-433-8850. Here is John in Columbia, Md. Hi, John.

JOHNHi. Good morning, sir. Thank you for taking my call. I was just curious as to how the patent process or copyright process would work for intellectual property as it pertains to the Internet to certain website or Web design ideas, if you guys would encourage it or how you go about it, given the ambiguity of the patent process in general and the turbulent times it's going through right now, if it's even possible to get intellectual property copyright or patent online for Web ideas.

NNAMDIAny idea, Dave Troy?

TROYI think it's a really tricky area. I mean, if you go talk to folks in Silicon Valley about patents in general, especially in the IT field, there's not a lot of patent, you know, work being pursued. Now, that's in the IT field. If you get into things like bioscience and, you know, other types of more physical technology, there tends to be a lot more interest in patents. But in terms of things on the Web, in general, software patents are perceived right now amongst a lot of people in the tech startup community as the kind of things that get in the way because there's a lot of people sort of sitting on patents.

TROYThere's a lot of sort of spurious patents that really don't have a lot of merit. And so I think it can be a little bit of a tricky area. For me, you know, and most of the people that I work with in kind of the IT-Silicon Valley world, really, market adoption and market penetration are more important than patent protection. But again, in the IT -- I'm sorry. In the bio and sort of medical space, that's a little bit different.

NNAMDIIncubators like ETC do offer clinics with legal assistance for issues like this, don't they, Ann Lansinger?

LANSINGERWe absolutely do. We have a legal clinic. We have an accounting clinic. We have a leadership clinic. And we have some assistance for people with business resources. But with the legal clinic, it meets monthly. We ask people to let us know what their questions are in advance if possible so that we can give them to the law firm in town. Duane Morris law firm provides free advice and mentoring to people, answering questions, giving information, giving guidance on a regular basis. So IP is definitely covered in that area.

NNAMDIEllen?

HEMMERLYYeah. I would just say -- echoing what Dave mentioned, certainly at the university, we will look at IP protection for software and for IT developments. But -- and years and years ago, I did some venture capital up in Philadelphia. You know, we always said, in the IT space, the most important thing is to be first to market and to develop a viable business.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, John. We're going to take a short break. When we come back -- if you'd like to call and you can call in the break, it's 800-433-8850. What advantages or disadvantages do you see for tech companies in Baltimore? 800-433-8850, or send email to kojo@wamu.org. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our Tech Tuesday conversation on Baltimore tech startups. We're talking with Ellen Hemmerly. She is the executive director of the University of Maryland Baltimore County Research Park Corporation. Dave Troy is the CEO of 410 Labs, which is a Baltimore-based company that develops communication tools, including Shortmail, which you'll be hearing about very shortly, simplified email limited to 500 characters or less. Mike Brenner is the founder of Startup Baltimore.

NNAMDIAnd Ann Lansinger is the president of the Emerging Technology Centers, which is a tech incubator initiative of the Baltimore Development Corporation. Dave, you are a self-described serial entrepreneur. Tell us about your company called Shortmail.

TROYYes. So I, about, I guess, a little over a year ago, started a company called 410 Labs with my partner Matt Koll, who is also a serial entrepreneur. And we have a product. We have two products. One is called Replyz, which helps people find answers to questions that they have online. And the other product is called Shortmail, which is -- we kind of describe it as an unholy marriage of Twitter and email. We wanted to try kind of an experiment with email and come up with maybe some solutions to some of the problems that exist with email.

TROYI mean, you hear about people talking about email overload and just, you know, how kind of overwhelming email has become. And what we wanted to do is to experiment with some design constraints that we thought would lead to a better experience with email. So one of the things that we've done is made Shortmail to have messages that are less than 500 characters, which is sort of borrowing an idea from Twitter, but what we find is that when those messages are shorter, they can be presented much more conversationally.

TROYAnd then, also, just while I was sitting here, I got a Push notification on my iPhone of a Shortmail message that I received, basically keeping me totally up-to-date with what's going on with my -- one of my correspondents here, and I'm able to see most of that message just right in the Push notification. So it's a little bit different, and it's kind of an experiment.

NNAMDILimited to 500 characters, no attachments.

TROYNo attachments for now, yeah.

NNAMDIThank you. Mike, one of your initiatives has been to create hack days in Baltimore to address some specific issues like, oh, what teachers want. Tell us about that.

BRENNERSo one of the interesting facts about Baltimore and the area around Baltimore is that it has the highest concentration of IT professionals than anywhere else in the country, and that beats Boston and Silicon Valley included. And so, to me, that just says we're not tapping into these people. They're not actively participating. I don't see those numbers per se. Although I see a lot of IT people, I just don't see those numbers. So what we've done is this is going to be our second of events where we've basically try to prototype a technology company over the course of a weekend.

BRENNERSo we -- on a Friday night, we kind of have people shout out ideas for things they want to build or problems that they see and try to come up with a solution. We'll naturally have teams form around those individual ideas, and then we'll start a competition of sorts. They'll work around the clock until Sunday, and then we'll have a distinguished panel of judges kind of rate who were the best companies, who were the best products that came out of this weekend and then award prizes. So we did one in April, and we had some great success.

BRENNERAnd we've got a handful of guys that met each other on a Friday night and are still working on their companies today together that have received funding since. This coming weekend, Nov. 12 and 13, we're going to be doing the same thing, but it's going to be focused around education. My girlfriend is a first grade teacher in Baltimore County, and she comes home all the time with ideas or problem statements for things that could be fixed in her classroom. And I said, you know what...

NNAMDISo you organized a hack day to assist in your relationship?

BRENNERThat's exactly right.

BRENNERShe got tired of me trying to come up with solutions, so I said I'll just get a bunch of my friends around the table. And we'll -- you know, we'll all pitch in on this together. So rather than getting the business folks together and having them come up with ideas that they want to solve in education, which seems to be a very common problem these days as education technology is being -- is coming from a lot of developers and business folks, rather than from the teachers or the customers that are going to be using these products, we've asked teachers to go online and submit problems in their classroom.

BRENNERFor example, I wish it was easier to schedule parent-teacher conferences. So that's a problem statement. And what we'll do as designers and developers is try to tackle that problem. So we've got over 100 registered developers and designers that are going to be coming to Digital Harbor High School...

NNAMDIRealize you've jumped right into the middle of the education reform debate, having to do with parents and teachers.

BRENNERWell, why not? Well, why not, right? So we have people coming together on Saturday morning at Digital Harbor in Baltimore City. It's a fantastic school. And we're going to have teachers that we've picked from this pool of ideas to come and throw out their ideas, and they're kind of going to navigate the teams on how the product is going to be built over the course of the weekend. On Sunday, we're going to award prizes.

BRENNERAnd rather than giving away cash and flashy things, like iPads and computers, which do nothing to sustain a business, we're going to be giving to some of these companies six-month office space, for example, at Anne's ETC. Or we're going to give them, you know, thousands of dollars worth of legal and corporation documents. Or -- we've got even a flight lined up to go to Nashville, to one of the big ed tech conferences there for one of our winning teams.

BRENNERSo the goal here -- my goal is to try to create new companies, new startups in Baltimore to get people to cheat on their day jobs, leave the government, cheat on your day job for a weekend, come experience something new, something fresh, and let's tackle something big like education.

NNAMDIAnd, Ann Lansinger, we mentioned this earlier in the context of patents, but the incubator puts together a number of clinics to offer professional assistance of all kinds to your startups. Tell us about those.

LANSINGERWell, I already mentioned the legal clinic, but we also have an accounting finance clinic. Stout, Causey & Horning comes over, again, once a month, although any of these people would be willing to see people more frequently or in between. It's just that that seems to be a timeframe that works well. So if anybody has any kind of questions, from simple accounting to very complicated tax issues, they could come and talk to the folks in our clinic and get those questions answered. We have what we call a leadership clinic.

LANSINGERActually, it's run by our entrepreneur in residence, who is a cashed out person who has run a few companies. And he'll come in and help people with strategic and logistical questions with an open-hours format. And then, lastly, we have another opportunity for people to meet with one of our other mentors. And we call it a clinic. Actually, what that one is is an opportunity to sit down and go through all the checklists of basic business resources that are available and basic business needs that the company should be thinking of so that we do a little bit of a quick diagnostic with that entrepreneur early on.

LANSINGERAnd then, also, we're able to put together a whole host of small needs at that early stage. When we're working with the companies in the actual incubation program, we're going to address all of their other needs, whether they be marketing or finances or just about any kind of a need that a company would have in starting a business.

NNAMDIAnd, Ellen, you'll be happy to hear that we got an email from Joseph, who says, "The Alex Brown Entrepreneurial Center at the UMBC campus is holding a business idea competition on Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. Students are pitching business ideas to a group of judges and students. Any venture capital groups who might want to hear some unique business ideas should come on out." And here's Art in Glen Burnie, Md. Art, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

ARTHi. Yes. I had a question for Ann from earlier. Ann, you made a statement -- I believe it was you.

NNAMDINo, I think it was Ellen who talked about -- but go ahead.

ARTOh, I'm sorry. Yes. It was about their -- for incubator companies, their requirement that there needs to be a public element with them, for the funding, in order to actually achieve something that's going to have good results, is that the only paradigm that's going to work? Or can there be more encouragement of getting private companies to fund the incubators as well?

HEMMERLYYeah. I think my statement was that most of the really flourishing incubators have a public or quasi-public sector sponsor. But in terms of the companies coming into the incubators, we're looking for private companies, essentially, that are privately funded. And one of the things that we do with our companies is we work with them to find both public funding, whether it's grants that they can get through the federal government or, ultimately, private funding.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Art. We move on to Julia in Washington, D.C. Julia, your turn.

JULIAHi there. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to say that this is a fabulous, sort of serendipitous program to stumble on because I moved to Washington, D.C., and I was looking at starting up an existing company that I have that actually manufactures products in Jakarta, Indonesia. And so I was looking at different areas of D.C. for finding manufacturing space, like old derelict warehouses. And we actually sew our products. And I've heard a lot about IT. And, you know, these are just all businesses that stem from the brain.

JULIABut I have a business that stems from, you know, making things by hand again, using sewing machines, in the United States. And one of the things that drove me to wanting to find a domestic production facility was when I went to look for cotton sewers, I couldn't find any. And I know -- I was just thinking about Baltimore and all the beehive concept, the incubator system you have. And I'm just in the process right now of finding out what exists in D.C.

NNAMDIWell, Julia, you will want to hear me read this email we got from Peter in Baltimore. He says, "I work at a company called CyberPoint International that started up in Baltimore two years ago. Since then, we've grown from four people to near 90 today. We're a cyber security company. Being in Baltimore has been a huge factor in our success for all the reasons mentioned so far.

NNAMDI"I'd just like to add that Baltimore has a very strong arts and design community. I think that this community has the potential to be one of Baltimore's greatest assets for the tech community. Artists and designers can help make technology better for people and really humanize technology. Just look at how design plays a role at Apple." I don't know if design would have anything at all to do with your business, Julia, but I suspect it might.

JULIAYes. Yes, it does, absolutely. Actually, I mean, I don't want to get into the details so much for the show, but it's -- my company, we actually collect non-recyclable plastic packaging materials. And we don't reprocess it. We simply cut it, make huge panels and then cut, like, laptop bags, iPad covers out of the design. So it is -- it's very artistic. It is all about design. However, I have to go to Asia for my manufacturing. It kills me on the shipping and the VAT and -- you know, just anytime you have...

NNAMDISo you would like to establish a kind of D.C.-Baltimore partnership.

JULIAWell, actually, I'd like to compare D.C. to Baltimore. I mean, I'm looking at the neighborhood of Petworth right now, which is a transitional neighborhood, and it has a lot of abandoned buildings. It would be great to put 20 sewing machines in, and let's just start making our own products. But now I'm thinking about Baltimore because of this show. And I'm thinking about, you know, when I drive, like, through 95 and I see the Domino Sugar sign, and I just think about Baltimore and sort of the grittier side of it.

NNAMDIWell, I'm sure...

JULIAThe post-Industrial site is exciting, in a way.

NNAMDIWe're running out of time, but I'm sure you'll get a lot of approving nods around this table.

HEMMERLYRight.

NNAMDIOne quibble, though, Julie. You said you stumbled across this program?

JULIAWell, no, I always listen to you. However, I shouldn't have said I stumbled upon you.

NNAMDIThank you. Thank you. Thank you.

JULIABut I couldn't believe -- I could not believe...

NNAMDIThank you.

JULIA...the program today 'cause it's a very interesting program to me.

NNAMDIThank you very much.

JULIASo thank you very much.

NNAMDII hated to think that you were drinking and stumbled into the radio, but thank you very much for saying you're a regular listener. Baltimore is opening up in this way, in a lot of ways, isn't it, Mike Brenner?

BRENNERYes. So Baltimore has a music scene that Brooklyn bows down to, and I've heard this from many different sources. You know, the arts community in Baltimore is also fantastic. MICA is a fantastic arts school there. And I think this has to do with kind of this city that used to be priding itself on manufacturing that has since kind of died down, this Detroit model as well. It kind of allows for a lot of opportunities, abandoned warehouses and this kind of community...

NNAMDIReinventing itself as an arts and design and technology center. You got five seconds, Dave.

TROYYeah. I just wanted to say to Julia that we're going to have an event -- probably in January -- in Baltimore called Create Baltimore that's going to have a manufacturing track. And we would love to invite Julia up to, you know, look at some spaces and establishments there.

NNAMDIDave Troy. He's the CEO of 410 Labs. Ellen Hemmerly is the executive director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Research Park Corporation. Mike Brenner is the founder of Startup Baltimore. And Ann Lansinger is president of the Emerging Technology Center, which is a tech incubator initiative of the Baltimore Development Corporation. Thank you all for joining us. And thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.